Hi everyone…Stewart here again from the Envato Product Team…I hope you’ve had a good start to 2014!

I want to let you know that we’re making some changes to how ratings work which we aim to launch some time next week (27-31 January). Based on the conversation started in the middle of last year, we know there are many things we could do in relation to ratings. The feedback we’ve received from the Community suggests that the key problem for us to focus on here is: Authors not knowing why they get low ratings...the solution and scope of what we’re developing is focussed on this.

Some of you may also remember that last year we collected some feedback from buyers to understand their ratings a bit more. It turns out that 86% of ratings on the MPs are 4 or 5 stars. Across the thousands of items on the 8 Marketplaces there are no more than 350 lower ratings (3, 2 or 1) per day – and usually a lot less than this. The reasons for these lower ratings were varied but most commonly it was about a perception of “poor support” (even though support is not mandatory) or bugs with an item.

Despite the small number of lower ratings, we understand that authors have often put a huge amount of work and care into their items and each rating potentially provides an opportunity to improve an item to hopefully make more sales. This is why we are focussing on providing authors feedback when they receive low ratings.

What are the changes?

When a buyer rates an item they’ll be invited to provide a reason for the rating and some comments…collectively we call this a review. A review will be mandatory for ratings of 3, 2 and 1 and optional for 4 and 5. For the 4 and 5 star ratings, a buyer will be allowed to “quick rate” an item without a review so authors can see this positive feedback too.

Once a review has been made, authors will be notified via email and the review will be visible to them on a new tab next to the comments dashboard and also as a new tab against the item. These tabs will have a continuous feed of all of the ratings for an item which can be filtered down to only those that have a review.

Only the Author will be able to see the reviews…they are not publicly viewable for the time being as the main aim is to provide authors feedback to improve their items if they want. The star ratings on the item page will still be publicly visible to everyone – they are not changing at the moment.

Is there anything else?

Like every project we work on, as mentioned earlier we recognise that there is a lot we could do with ratings….we have to prioritise these things against the long list of other great ideas (many of which come from the Community) that have nothing to do with ratings. At this stage we have kept the scope focused on this so that we can move on to other very valuable projects like a shopping cart.

We will be measuring and monitoring the impact of these changes to guide possible future moves in relation to ratings.

A big thanks to you, the Community for your patience and suggestions…we know it has taken a while to get to this. Also, thanks to Cath, Emmanuel, Jordan and Steve as well as our Community, Support and Marketing teams for their great input into bringing this to life.

Thanks for the update Stewart, this is easily some of the best news I’ve heard in a while

Also, are there any future developments regarding the rating of audio items? One of the biggest issues with ratings over on AudioJungle is that the item is fully preview-able/downloadable before purchase, so naturally ratings seem a bit arbitrary, and can do more damage than good in some cases. Just wondered if there had been any discussion on this?

“(...) so that we can move on to other very valuable projects like a shopping cart.”

Such teasing

I’m curious if the rating “reviews” will work retroactively, i.e. buyers that rated 1/2/3 in the past will be invited to make a review on that rating. I think I know the answer to this, but at the very least, make old (and new) ratings of 1 star have less strength on the calculation of the average, IF, disregarding that 1 star rating, the average rating of the item is 4 or 5 stars.

Hoooorayyyyy

Point of this was to show to other interested customers what these 1-star ratings are about, so that they can ignore that rating if it is for a stupid reason.

If that is not available to buyers and I can see that it is a ridiculous reason, it makes the whole thing even more frustrating. Now people can even write me some hate-mails (“heya look here, 1 star for you hahaha”) while rating me down, nobody else will know and can only guess.
So do we have a report-function to remove bad ratings in case they are nonsense?

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